Which Objectives Need a Dial? Predicting Objective Conflict and Covering Trade-offs in Steerable Pluralistic Alignment

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.26929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: People hold diverse, sometimes conflicting values, so no single aligned model can satisfy everyone. Pluralistic alignment therefore calls for steerable models that can balance competing objectives differently. Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO) does this by using an objective weight to span a continuum of trade-offs. We study two questions: when can one model improve two objectives simultaneously, and how can many trade-offs b